ABSTRACT
Perhaps the best way to start is by offering a brief bit of history, because it’s easy to become discouraged unless we contemplate how far we have come in a very short period of time. At this point in our history of youth work and youth work education in the United States, we see largely a patchwork of efforts— some based in direct service organizations, others in intermediaries; some at community colleges and others at universities. But these efforts are much more robust and coherent than they were 20 years ago, when I conducted a study of American youth organizations for the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (Carnegie Council, 1992). At that time, the Carnegie Task Force on Youth Development and Community Programs struggled to define some of the basic concepts around which there is now general consensus—for example, what we mean by the terms “youth development” and “youth worker;” how our efforts in the nonschool hours relate to (are similar to and yet different from) the work of schools; and the variety of practice settings in which youth workers operate. As part of that study, we convened a consultation with experts on the professional development of youth workers, recognizing the importance of this issue in relation to quality of and access to youth development programs. The consultation consisted of a pre-meeting survey and a day-long convening of 19 experts from across the youth development field, including representatives from national and local youth-serving organizations, researchers from several universities and staff leaders from several national intermediary organizations (Center for Early Adolescence, United Way of America, Wellesley School Age Child Care Project—now the National Institute on Out-of-School Time). The results of the day-long meeting were summarized in a written report, which was distributed widely within the youth development field (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1991). Preparing this chapter provided me with the impetus to revisit that document, and to assess the field’s progress on the 10 overarching recommendations made by the panel of experts convened during this field-wide consultation:
